Demo tips?

[Matthew Glover]

I've been chattering nonstop about how cool Capes is to pretty much anybody who doesn't tell me to shut up already, and so tomorrow I've got two different dates to show it off to people.  One is at my friendly local game shop, so I expect I'll also have random gamers asking us what all the noise is about. 

Beyond the shpiels in Capes Lite, what sort of advice do you have for demoing the game to people?  I have little experience actually playing (though I've read this forum exhaustively), so how can I go about showing it off without screwing it up?

An aside to Tony:  I was using the Flash character generator to prep a few things and ran into a couple of bugs.  Some digging around turned up Larry Lade's report of them, but I wanted to add another one to the list.

I found a couple bugs on the Minor Parts page.

The first two character name blanks are not rendering in the comic book font.
The role blank on the first character is not selectable.

In addition, when I printed out my Minor Parts, the second character's Name printed in the second character's Role blank on top of the role text.  Also, the role text was in a plain font rather than the comic font.

Nonetheless, the generator is a stellar piece of work.  Thanks!

Matthew

[TonyLB]

Dang it ... I have the hardest time telling when I haven't properly attached the comic font outlines to a given field, because (of course) my computer knows how to render the text without that information, so I never get the wrong printout.  Okay, I'll go fix that, hopefully soon.

As for demo suggestions, my question is what sort of demo you want to run:  is this a one hour demo to give people a taste of the whole system, or a ten minute demo to give people a taste of what the system feels like (without actually teaching it to them)?

For a one hour demo I recommend a nice, iconic situation:  Bank robbery, or hostages at city hall, or a showdown in the villain's volcano laboratory while the doomsday device counts down.  If you have more than three people (including yourself) I recommend that you make sure that at least one other person is playing a villain ... otherwise you're going to get so slammed by superior numbers at first that they won't see the system in action, and by the time they realize what folly they've committed by giving you all those Story Tokens it will be too late.  I recommend making at least one conflict which is not about physical stuff, but about emotional:  "Goal:  Be the person in charge of the hero team" is a good one (particularly if you've got the common "one villain, two heroes" triad) ... it gives them an opportunity to use the conflict rules against each other, and to see how they are more general than just fisticuffs.  The emotional conflicts always end in fisticuffs though, just warning you.

For a ten minute demo you go much faster, obviously.  You need to have done some prep-work in advance, but it can be done.  Here's what I do.  Let them choose from pre-made character descriptions.  Do not show them actual character sheets in this demo, it will only distract them..  Let them choose from one of three pre-made conflicts per character.  Put the conflicts on the table, put dice on them.  Hand out two points of debt, a five point Inspiration specific to the character, and two story tokens.  Say "Okay, we're each going to get one turn, in sequence, rolling a die.  High die on a side is controlling the conflict.  Those story tokens can be spent for an extra turn.  The Inspiration can be spent to turn a die up to 5.  Two points of debt can be spent to split a die into two dice of equal total value."  Then you take the first turn, spend an Inspiration, split the die, roll up the two and be absolutely merciless in your temporary victory.  Again, a combination of physical tasks ("Beat Iron Brain to a broken pile of scrap metal") and emotional ("Humiliate Major Victory on national television") is key.  When people have gotten a chance to spend some story tokens, but before any conflict is resolved you say "And that's basically how it goes."  They will sit, stunned, realizing that you aren't going to let them actually have the chance to humiliate the smug Major Victory once and for all.  You tease!  You then tell them that people who lose conflicts they're staked on get doubled debt, and that too much debt is bad.  And also that people who lose conflicts where other people are staked get story tokens, while people who win conflicts get inspirations.  They have the context now to understand the behaviors that will drive.  Then you sell 'em the book.

The ten minute demo does not teach any of the following:  Character creation, abilities, claiming, resolving, earning debt, gloating, exemplars, abstracts ... and on and on.  It teaches the following:  Conflicts, "And Then" rule, "Not Yet" rule, Story Tokens, Inspirations, Debt.  The core of the system, in other words.

'kay ... did that help?

[Matthew Glover]

Yes, that helped tremendously.  That's exactly the sort of stuff I was hoping for, especially the recommendation to throw in an emotional conflict between the good guys early.  That's masterful and I love it.  :D

Regarding the ten minute demo:  You're brilliant and evil.  "Then you sell them the book."  Hahahaha

[Kai_lord]

And the best part about the 10 minute demo - it WORKS. Tony got me that way.

[Matthew Glover]

Okay, so I finally got to test out my ten-minute demo skillz last Saturday night.  It went pretty well, though it ended up being a twenty-four minute demo rather than ten. Yes, I timed it.  :p 

Here's my question:  Should I be skipping reactions? 

Here's why I ask:  I had two other players.  At one action+three reactions per player per turn, with three turns, plus another three turns from story tokens (I misremembered and only gave out one story token each rather than two each), we had twenty-four (re)actions.  That works out to an average of one minute per (re)action.  If I had skipped reactions and given out the recommended two story tokens, we would've gone through one action per turn, three turns, plus six more turns from tokens for a total of nine actions.  At one minute per, that's MUCH closer to the estimated ten minutes.

Now, immediately after we played the demo, we went on and played a one-hour game.  I just wanted to try out the demo first because I'm doing a whole bunch of these at my FLGS on Saturday and I wanted to polish my chops.  I think that doing reactions was beneficial to that because my demoees said that there was already a lot more going on than in the demo.  I'm just not sure which way to lean.

[TonyLB]

Thanks for giving it a shot, Matthew!  I don't know what the right way to feed into a full session is, either.

Here's my question:  Should I be skipping reactions?

Well, I do.  My experience exactly mirrors yours, that removing the reactions shaves about fifteen minutes off the time of the demo.

I've recently written up a Formal Ten Minute Demo, with most of the prep-work that I list above, as well as step by step instructions about which rules to preserve, which rules to ignore.  I should probably make that accessible from the web-site ... I was mostly focused (in making it) on providing it for the Indie Press Gang folks who are running demoes at cons, and it slipped my mind.

[Matthew Glover]

Excellent!  That's a huge help, thanks again.

[Matthew Glover]

Okay, I've gotta ask.  Earlier you said

Do not show them actual character sheets in this demo, it will only distract them.

Why did you include them?

For mine I made up a card for each with the character's blurb ( Mystical warrior trained in deadly hand-to-hand techniques and ninja magic.  Eagle Fist's master, an ancient scholar and martial artist named Desert Adder, was dishonorably ambushed and killed by Omega Machine.) and a list of four powers on it and had them use one of those powers each time they rolled.  I also considered giving them debt each time they did so, just to show off the way you earn it. 

[TonyLB]

Yeah, that makes sense.  I did this because this is a compilation of the stuff that I've used, historically, to run this demo.  I created the demo with these materials already on hand for different purposes.

Now hopefully I'll shake loose enough time, sometime soon, to get my head clear and actually create the right materials to run the demo, as opposed to publishing the stuff I use because it's on-hand.

[Matthew Glover]

Ah, I gotcha.  I was worried that there was something going on that I wasn't understanding.  Fantastic.

I'm going to use some of the examples in your demo document to polish up my stuff.  I especially like the Inspiration cards referring to past exploits.  I'm totally using that.

I'll let you know how it goes on Saturday.  :)

[Matthew Glover]

I had a great time demoing Capes today!  I ended up running four demos, one with three people and three with two people each.  Both of the FLGS owners and everyone who tried it out had a ton of fun.  Nearly everybody got the hang of it pretty quickly.  Only a couple of people seemed to have any trouble, and I believe they were guys who'd never played an actual roleplaying game before.  This store's business is almost all board and card games and I roped in several of the teens who were there for Magic and Pokemon.

Several people expressed interest in playing a real game at the store, so I'll probably try to coordinate something like that soon. 

I think the worst problem that I ran into was that one of my pregen heroes went through every demo without getting picked.  Over and over again players picked my Superman ripoff and (oddly, I thought) my Iron Fist ripoff.  I had one who picked the speedster and a couple picked the teleporter, but noooobody was interested in my master of electrical forces.  I think the problem was the name I picked.  It was kinda girly, and all my players were guys, mostly teenagers.  Also nobody picked my villain.  I'm not sure if they weren't interested or just weren't aware that it was an option. 

I don't think I made it sufficently clear that it's a GM-less game.  I know that some people got that, but I think I failed to emphasize that I wasn't running anything, that we were all just playing.  Oh, and again and again I had to push people to narrate the outcome of their actions before rolling the dice.  I need to work on how exactly to explain this so that it's easier to grasp.  Maybe I should go read my book again and see how it's phrased there.  Also, people were oddly really reluctant to narrate actually harming my bad guy.  The thing that startled me the most was when one guy narrated using his Laser Eye-Beams on me.  "Laser Eye-Beams?  Right in the chest?  Oh, that's brutal!" I said.  "What happens?"    "Um.  It doesn't actually hurt you.  Your Power Armor just absorbs it."   "Oh.  Uh, okay."  That was balanced out later in the same demo, though.  The other guy who was playing didn't hesitate when he narrated ripping off my arm and beating me with it.  That guy got it.

Nobody really bothered reading the rules summary I caged from Tony's sample demo materials and nobody really bothered to read the character writeups in great detail before picking characters.  That didn't seem to matter in the slightest bit once we started playing, though.  Next time I may not bother with the rules summary.  I think I'll just give everybody a copy of Capes Lite and some click and locks after the fact.

[TonyLB]

Cool!  I'm so glad you had a good time.

I think the worst problem that I ran into was that one of my pregen heroes went through every demo without getting picked.

I see the same thing.  Hyperion almost never gets chosen, from my example characters.  I don't know why.

I don't think I made it sufficently clear that it's a GM-less game.

Eh ... I've had people play the game for hours with me and not realize that I'm not the GM.  Then somebody mentions it in passing, and they get this confused look and say "But ... Tony's the GM!", and someone says "Well, what was he doing different from any of us?" and the confused person furrows up their brow for a minute or two and then says "Oh SHIT!"

If they're still willing to stick it to you (like ripping off your villains arm and beating him with it, f'rexample) then it doesn't matter what they call you.  But yeah, that whole thing about being tentative (which, IME, is unrelated to whether they think you're the GM) can be a problem.  I usually ask a second time with really vivid examples.  "Sure, the Power Armor absorbs it ... but does the impact blast me right back through a building?  Does the building collapse on me?"